THE PROJECT

The Mass/Cass History Project will use historical records and a lot of interviews, to tell the story of a small but important Boston neighborhood from 2014 to 2024.

The area just south of the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard became what some describe as a “containment zone”. It was an area where drug use and sales were more tolerated compared to other parts of the city, and an area in which many people experiencing homelessness were in shelters, or staying on the street. The formal elements of the zone were ended in the fall of 2023—but that didn’t end homelessness, or drug use, or controversies about what to do next.

When I started working in this area as a doctor in early 2015, I spent most of my time thinking about medical things: overdoses, addiction, infections. But I’ve always also been interested in the ways that big systems affect individual people’s lives. So now I’m also thinking past Atkinson Street; past Mass Ave. I’m thinking about zoning. About real estate. And the economics and politics that led to the creation of this zone, and kept it going for so long.

To tell this story I need to talk to lots of people! Maybe you were homeless, and stayed in shelters nearby, or lived on the streets in this area. Or maybe you rented or owned a home nearby; or spent time in the area in a halfway house or residential treatment program. Maybe you had a family member down here who you were worried about. Maybe you worked in the area, as a police officer, a healthcare worker, a city worker, an attorney, as a correctional officer, or in a nearby business or organization. Or maybe you were in a neighborhood or political group that was part of debates about this area. However you were part of this story, I want to talk with you.

If you were working or living on those streets you can tell the story of how policy decisions from the city and state and others had an effect on your work or your life—whether positive, negative, or no effect at all. If you were part of those policy debates and decisions, you can explain how and why the choices got made.

If you’re wondering about where I’m coming from, before you tell your story, I’m glad to talk to you about that for as long as you like. I have a point of view (see more below)—but my biggest point of view is that, although I had a small part in this story, I didn’t really understand it. Or at least, not as well as I will, when I talk to you.

I can just about guarantee you that I will talk with people who disagree with your point of view about this story, and probably others who agree with parts and disagree with parts. And that’s why I hope you will talk to me. Without a multitude of points of views and stories, we can’t really understand the history of Mass/Cass. And until we do, other people can’t learn from it.

I’m glad to talk to you on the record, confidentially, or entirely “on background”, whatever you’re most comfortable with.

background

I’m an addiction medicine doctor in one part of my life, but for this project I’m not primarily telling a story about addiction or healthcare. The story includes addiction, and drugs, and love, and violence, hope, defeat, and a lot of other human things. You can’t understand the city story without understanding those individual stories. But this is a story about a city—and actually, indirectly, about a lot of cities.

Many wealthy cities in the United States have struggled in the last decade about how to respond to street homelessness and drug use. Often the public debates center around either-or questions: Order or chaos? Cruelty or compassion? Is drug use a crime issue or a health issue?

As a doctor, you’d think I’d see everything as a health issue! But actually, as a doctor treating substance use disorder, I became very clear on the limits of what I could do to improve my patients’ lives. And I was always very clear on the limits of what drug treatment could do to change the city’s landscape.

I’ve come to think that the real questions of why a number of wealthy cities have a lot of homelessness and public drug use these days is also about zoning. Real estate. Housing prices. And how we run cities.

In cities where land is cheap, a lot of drug use takes place behind closed doors, or in vacant lots, or abandoned buildings. Places where no one is keeping track—or at least, no one who has influence in city hall. In cities where land is expensive, though, there aren’t many vacant lots unclaimed by developers. There aren’t many abandoned buildings—most get fixed up and sold. As each square foot of land costs more and more, there are fewer and fewer pieces of land where no one is keeping track; fewer places where people can tuck themselves away.

Urban planners talk about this as “infill”—part of how cities are being revitalized. Health researchers have shown that when vacant lots get cleaned up, the health of the neighbors improves.

But when the vacant lot gets turned into an apartment building… what happens to the people who were in that vacant lot using drugs?

When a police department responds to a neighborhood’s frustrations by successfully moving the drug trade off the corner… where do the drug sellers go?

When an area of the city gets “cleared”, the people who get cleared out, generally go somewhere else.

There are reasons that a particular “somewhere else” emerges. Policies and practices of city management, whether by deliberate design or not, determine the places to which people on the street are expected to go. In Boston, that place was often Mass/Cass. So much so, in fact, that it started to just seem like the natural order of things.

The zone partly evolved from what was there over decades prior to 2014. But in this time period, its growth came both from changes in drug use and the supply of drugs, and also a series of explicit policy choices. I want to find out: why? and why in that spot? And what does this have in common with other cities?

How did this particular area of Boston become the drug zone? Who made it that way, and who kept it that way? What was it like for the people who regularly spent time in that zone, or lived on its streets? And why did the zone, after it got built up over years to include seemingly permanent infrastructure, suddenly get dismantled?

Different cities have done this differently. But many cities have pursued versions of this containment strategy as a way of managing competing interests within a city. As a way of keeping the peace—sort of. In talking to people about Mass/Cass and its trajectory over this time period, almost everyone describes failures. But everyone has a different explanation of what failed, and why.

For ten years, I worked in this area as a doctor. (I still do.) Now I’m looking it in a new way as a writer, and as someone interested in cities. I want to know more about why cities make the choices they do. I want to find out what happens as a result of those choices—and how those choices affect people’s lives.